Pre-Show Ponders: Interview with Collin Yates of Sun Records Live - The Concert

Sun Records Live - The Concert is an official concert with live performances made famous by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins, along with other Sun artists like Billy Lee Riley and Rufus Thomas, Jr. As performers take the stage as these iconic musicians, they combine stories and facts with hits like “Great Balls of Fire,” “That’s All Right,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “I Walk The Line,” “Whole Lotta Shaking Goin’ On,” “Ooby Dooby,” and many more.

The production features music made famous by the Sun Records Recording Studio in Tennessee.

Collin Yates is a performer in the show and in addition to playing Elvis and Carl Perkins, he also plays guitar throughout the production.

Tell me a little bit about yourself and your background. 

Collin Yates: So I have been a professional actor/musician since I got out of college in 2019. I went to East Carolina University (ECU) for my BFA in Theatre Arts with a concentration in Musical Theater and I was part of the professional acting program. I took the Meisner training at ECU, but I didn't graduate with that degree because I took the Tepper Semester through Syracuse University and  spent my final semester of college in New York. I was learning from professionals in the field and seeing shows every week – just a fantastic semester. In high school, I took classes at the North Carolina Theatre conservatory. Both my siblings are actors and my sister is a teacher. 

They just graduated from ECU with a Theatre Education degree. My brother is a director and he has his own theatre company, and both of my parents were actors. My dad is actually the technical director for North Carolina Theatre. So I’ve been doing theater for a long time!

I've been playing guitar for a little over a decade. My dad played guitar for 40 years – and still plays guitar – and taught me some very basic stuff. I went to lessons early on, but I didn't really stay in lessons because I wanted to learn what I wanted to learn and figure it out, so I ended up being self taught for most of my time. And then every once in a while, I’d go on YouTube for something I couldn't figure out. As I got more knowledgeable about guitar and just in general, I started just being able to figure out stuff on my own. 

Can you explain the Tepper Semester in New York?

CY: So I got a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Theatre Arts with a concentration in Musical Theatre. And then I basically transferred to Syracuse University through the Tepper Semester, which is a Syracuse program in which they take all of their students for their final semester – their acting, directing, and their design and production students – and they house them in New York City and they take classes in New York. What they have been doing for the past couple of years – I think it started a couple of years before I did it in 2019 – they started allowing people from other colleges to apply for the semester because they only had about 13 people in Musical Theatre, 13 in acting and 13 in D&P. They realized they could rent out bigger spaces and apartments to accommodate more students. One of my friends did the semester first. He was a year above me,  and when he graduated, I was like “Well, I want to do that. That sounds awesome.” So then me and two of my other friends also went to the Tepper Semester through ECU, and there were two other schools that sent their entire classes, so it was a big senior class through the Tepper Semester. 

What have you been doing since graduation? 

CY: Since I graduated in 2019, I’ve been around the country doing different shows. I went to Nashville, Indiana, I went to Nebraska, and I've worked at North Carolina Theatre multiple times since graduation. North Carolina Theatre actually gave me my equity card for doing Memphis in 2019, which we didn't actually get to perform because it got shut down by the pandemic. We were about two days from the designer run when we were told we had to shut down, but luckily, I was able to keep my card. 

Now I'm an Equity actor and after the pandemic ended, I did a couple of theme park gigs as a guitarist – me and my partner Kamilah did a show at Carowinds theme park where we were singing, doing duets, I was playing acoustic guitar, and she was playing violin – which was a great time. And then on the complete opposite spectrum, the next year I did a heavy metal show and played lead guitar in that, and that was really fun. 

Over the last year, I have gotten really specific and gotten into the world of Million Dollar Quartet, which is Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins. On December 4 1956, Carl Perkins was doing a recording session at Sun Records, and Sam Phillips hired an up-and-coming pianist, Jerry Lee Lewis, to record some piano on some of Carl's tunes. Jerry Lee was a completely new artist, nobody had ever heard of him before. Carl Perkins was coming off of his high from writing “Blue Suede Shoes” and a bunch of other stuff, Sam Phillips invited Johnny Cash to come over, and Elvis happened to be in the area. So all four of those guys were in the studio together singing spirituals and Christmas songs. That turned into a musical that has a huge following and a very specific group of people that do it. In the world of MDQ, everyone knows each other because there's only a very few people in the theater scene that can do these characters, play the instruments, act, and sing all together. Because these guys – Elvis and Carl and Johnny and Jerry Lee – they were masters in their art – in the 50s rock and roll, country, and rockabilly. So it's hard to find people that can actually do that. I did Million Dollar Quartet last year as Elvis, and I'm also a lead guitar player, but I was just playing acoustic. 

When I auditioned again later in the year – there's another musical called Million Dollar Quartet Christmas, which is a sequel to Million Dollar Quartet – I got to play Carl Perkins in that one and actually show off my lead chops. But before that, when I was doing my production of Million Dollar Quartet in Media, Pennsylvania, that's when I met John Rossi, who is the creator and main artistic director of Sun Records Live, so I met him through that production of Million Dollar Quartet and we've been touring with Sun Records. 

What's the difference between MDQ and MDQ Christmas? 

CY: Million Dollar Quartet is highly exaggerated because the truth of the day is that they were all in the studio just playing music and just having fun. But that's not really a plot and you can't really make theater out of that, so they kind of exaggerated some of the circumstances and some of the relationships. Most of it is true.They were all there and they played some of these songs, but they didn't actually play a lot of the songs in the musical on that specific day. 

Million Dollar Quartet Christmas – if the first one was a fanfiction, then Million Dollar Quartet Christmas is a fanfiction of a fanfiction – is even more exaggerated. But instead of all of their most famous songs, it is just Christmas music. It's just a bunch of Christmas music put together with the four of them doing it. So like Elvis sings “Blue Christmas,” Carl does a very famous one of his songs called “Cotton Top,” which is a Christmas story about a kid who gets a guitar and becomes famous. But it is a direct sequel. The plot of Million Dollar Quartet ends with them taking the famous picture, and Million Dollar Quartet Christmas starts with them taking the famous picture and then moves on from there. It's interesting because MDQ Christmas is kind of like a 50s version of A Christmas Carol because there's monologues that each character says to the audience about what their Christmases were like as kids, what their Christmases are like now, and what their Christmases are going to be like in the future. So it's kind of like a Ghosts of Christmas Present, Past, and Future kind of thing. 

It was a really, really fun show to do, and the great thing about the MDQ world is that in one production, you could be with people you've worked with five, six, seven times, and then the next production could be a completely new group of people. When I did Million Dollar Quartet, there were at least two people who had worked on the show thousands of times together. And then when I went to Million Dollar Quartet Christmas, which was in Mountain Carroll, Illinois at Timber Lake Playhouse, I met a completely new group of people, but three of them had just done Million Dollar Quartet like two months ago together. So it's really interesting - you hear of people very often and very frequently, because it's such a specific show. And then you'll go around and you'll be in Alabama with one cast, and then like two months later, you'll be in California with one person from that cast, but then another person from another cast that you did a year ago, and it's just a big puzzle piece that everyone's seeing each other all the time because everyone just does this show. 

How did you get involved with MDQ?

CY: I saw a listing on a Facebook group. There's a couple of different Facebook groups that are good for actor-musicians. There's a musical theater guitarist page, there's an actor-musician page, there's a Million Dollar Quartet page. On one of those pages, I saw that they were having last minute auditions for Elvis, and I was like “Yeah, I want to do that. That sounds cool,” so I got to do that. Once I was in this world, I worked my butt off and really tried to make sure I was giving an accurate representation of what it would have been like to see all Elvis in person. I don't want to overdo it, but I don't want to underdo it either. I want it to actually look like Elvis. 

A theatrical representation of Elvis is also very different from an Elvis impersonator. Elvis impersonators usually go for the later Elvis years where he's a little bit bigger and he's in the jumpsuits and all that kind of stuff. Million Dollar Quartet is when he's 21. He's a kid. He had just gotten to stardom, just got his first hit album, his first hit record, and so doing that version of Elvis, people don't really recognize it as much because they recognize the older, “fat” Elvis as opposed to the kid from Mississippi. 

How do you find that balance between the caricature that we typically see versus the authentic musician? 

CY: The caricatures definitely come from somewhere because if you look at later performances, he's very funny. He's very funny on stage and he doesn't really move. He’s in his 30s, 40s, something like that. He doesn't really move, he just stays there. He's the big hit, he doesn't have to work that hard. So it's not like the Elvis impersonators are doing a bad impersonation, they're just doing a very specific era of Elvis. Whereas for his younger era, I watched a very specific interview of Elvis coming back to Graceland after being overseas in Germany. That interview is really interesting because he's very muted, very honest, really just a kid, and instead of that back of the throat kind of thing, he just sounds like a guy and just sounds like himself. That Southern drawl he had morphed into what people know Elvis as now. I think the best way that I could figure out how to portray that on stage is to really undersell the voice and oversell the dialect, so lean into the fact that he's from Mississippi and listen to the Mississippi dialect. For all of his mannerisms and physicalities, all I have to do is look at it and try to imitate it. But the voice is definitely hard. The singing voice is a little bit easier because throughout high school, I was in choir, and through college, we had voice lessons. I took voice lessons outside of school and it's been hard to find some after the pandemic because it's hard to get in the room nowadays, but it’s helpful when knowing how to manipulate your voice and trying to replicate people's voices. Ever since I was really young, I was doing imitations of people's voices, like listening to Colm Wilkinson from the original cast of Les Mis and kind of doing that imitation. So figuring out how to do that while singing has always kind of come naturally for me. It was the speaking voice that I was like “Oh, we're gonna have to work on this.” 

How long did that take you to perfect the Elvis voice? 

CY: I think it's an ongoing battle because as I get older, my voice changes. Men's voices don't officially stop changing until their 30s. When you get over puberty as a teenager, your speaking voice is done changing, but your singing voice isn't done changing until about a decade later. So I still have to go back and listen to recordings of him and be like “Okay, where's my voice at right now? What do I feel like? Is my voice sitting lower than usual? Is my voice sitting higher than usual?” and based on that, mold it into Elvis. I think where people go wrong is when they think they've got it and they know exactly how to do it and they just stick with it, and then it starts to compound. You stop doing the work and it starts to get a little bit stale. Always knowing that you could just be a little bit better, working on it just a little bit, I think helps stop it from being a caricature. 

How is MDQ different from Sun Records Live?

CY: So MDQ is a full production musical. It has a set, it has costumes – we have costumes in Sun Records Live, but it's different. There is a production team that is trying to get a message across in story form and trying to tell the lives of these people with audiences just watching as if they were a fly on the wall in the studio that night.

And as much as I love that, Sun Records Live is different because it's not a story. You get some information throughout the night and we tell you some things about these guys but it is very much just a concert. It’s like if you went to a concert with Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash headlining with just them on the stage. It's way more relaxed than a musical is. You go in, you're just having a good time, we want you to hoop and holler, we want you to applaud, we want you to sing along, we want you to get up and dance if you feel like dancing because it's rock and roll music. It’s interesting because that's what we want MDQ to be as well. But because it's in a theater setting, it's in an auditorium and the lights are down here and the lights are up there, and there's dialogue going on, sometimes audience members are like “Okay, I have to be quiet. It's time for me to listen and pay attention.” Whereas with Sun Records Live, we want you to just have a good time in any way that you have a good time. If you want to listen to something, listen to something. If you don't want to listen and you want to sing along, do that too. If you want to get up and dance, absolutely. It's way more of a concert than a theatrical performance.

It's called a theatrical concert because we do give information and we talk about these people and give important information that people may not know, like that Sam Phillips basically recorded the very first rock and roll song. It's heralded by music historians as the first type of this music that the world has ever heard. So things like that – Sam Phillips really was instrumental in getting all these people together and moving it forward. You get that from MDQ, but in a very presentational way, and with Sun Records Live, it's just a concert. Let's just have fun. 

So do you perform as yourself or do you perform as Johnny Cash, Sam Phillips, etc.? 

CY: We're performing as the guys, and sometimes when we give information, like if we're giving important factoids, sometimes we'll be ourselves, sometimes we won't. But when I'm Elvis, I'm Elvis. I play Elvis and I also play Carl Perkins, who was the original writer of “Blue Suede Shoes,” along with a bunch of other hits. A lot of the Beatles' music is covers of Carl Perkins tunes – they looked up to him immensely, Carl Perkins’ songs showed the Beatle how they wanted to harmonize, so it was very instrumental. So I play Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and then Luther Perkins, the guitar player for Johnny Cash. So I play three people, but I'm just up there having fun. I'll go on in one costume and then I'll walk offstage and I’ll come back on in a different costume. 

Is this a production that’s currently on tour or is this a performance created for Theatre Raleigh? 

CY: This is the first time we're doing it not at a touring house. All the other places we've toured to have been touring houses where they don't put up their own productions. This is the first time we're doing it at an actual venue where they are a producing house. This is our show that we are touring, but this is the first time we're doing it at an actual theater, as opposed to like a casino or a touring house. I've done it I think three or four times on the road with them right now. There was another cast previously - the first production was in 2022 at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Atlantic City. They had done one or two other touring performances, and then summer of 2023 was my first production with the show. Last year, I was part of three performances of the show and then we got booked at Theatre Raleigh. This is the first time I've been with this show for longer than one day. Most of the time, we load in, we rehearse during the day, we perform at night, and then the next day, we're gone. This is the first time that I'm doing this show with multiple days of performances, and it’s going to feel really, really nice to actually settle in and be able to have fun with the band and not be like “Well, this is my one chance to do it.” It's gonna be a lot more fun.

What is the tour schedule like? Is it consistently on the road in a new city each week or is it more sporadic? 

CY: It's a little bit more scattered. I'm not sure exactly what the schedule is, but I know that last year from June to December, we performed three three times, so it wasn't super consistent. But I don't know a lot about that side. 

How did the production end up coming to Theatre Raleigh?

CY: Because I had a working relationship with Lauren, I went to John and was like “Hey, have you ever thought about doing it at Theatre Raleigh?” And he was like “If you could get us Theatre Raleigh, that would be awesome.” So then I went to Lauren and I was like “I know you guys do your concert series. I have this.” And it worked!

Have you worked with Theatre Raleigh before? 

CY: I've been performing on their cabaret stage before shows for the last couple of months. I started with The Prom and did a set before each show for each weekend of The Prom. And then for Barbecue, I did the entire performance run, so I was there every day doing acoustic and electric sets before the shows. This will be my first time performing at Theatre Raleigh though.

Actually, a long time ago – 2012, 2013, something like that – when North Carolina Theatre did Les Mis, Lauren Kennedy played Fantine and I was in the ensemble. So our relationship goes back a long way. I haven't done any shows with Theatre Raleigh as of yet, but I have known Lauren for a long time and a lot of the people because my dad is the technical director of North Carolina Theatre, so I've been around those people for a long time. And I love all of them. They're so much fun to be around.

What was the audition process like for the show, since you had already been part of the MDQ world?

CY: We were doing Million Dollar Quartet and John was playing the drums – he created the show and is the drummer for the show as well – and one day after rehearsal, he was like “Do you play lead guitar?” And I was like “Yeah.” And he was like “I’ll come back to you with something.” So later, he was like “Do you want to do this?” And I was like “Yeah! Let's do it. Okay.” 

What was the audition process for Million Dollar Quartet?

CY: I sent in a couple of virtual submissions – a couple of 50s songs. They came back at me with “Can you sing these Elvis songs because we want to make sure we can hear every era of Elvis.” They wanted one of the earlier, kind of scream-y songs and one of the later crooning, nice backspace songs. I sent those in and they were like “Hey, come do it.”

Can you talk about the music in Sun Records Live? 

CY: The music in the show is pretty much like a 50s rock and roll textbook. If you like rock and roll, you should come to the show to see how it all started. Literally. Sam Phillips was a producer. He started the Memphis Recording Service in 1950 and was essential in finding and influencing these artists to bring forth what they wanted to do. While he couldn't do it himself, he had the ear to be like “Do that this way,” and that's how rock and roll was born. Most of these guys – Elvis and Carl and Johnny – grew up listening to a combination of spirituals and country music, and R&B, and gospel, and through all of that, combined them all together into what is rock and roll. The 50s rock and roll specifically, things like Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins, The Beatles, all of that finds its roots in those other genres. They were really a combination of those styles. “When Blue Suede Shoes” first came out, it was topping the charts at R&B, country, and pop. And it wasn't on rock and roll because rock and roll wasn't invented at all yet. Nowadays, if Blue Suede Shoes came out, it would be just topping the charts of rock. But there was no rock, so it just topped all three. 

If you come to the show, you're going to hear some great classic ones, but also some really deep cut songs that people are not going to know. For example, Carl Perkins seems to be the artist that everyone doesn't know about, which is a shame because I think he is one of the craziest, most amazing guitarists and a really, really, really wonderful songwriter. “Blue Suede Shoes” obviously is huge, but there's also a song called “Honey Don't” that people will think is a Beatles song. But it was written by Carl Perkins and then the Beatles covered it. Later in Carl Perkins’ life, you can see concerts of Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, all these huge names that are like “Oh, I wouldn't be a guitarist without Carl Perkins.” I feel like he's kind of the last guitarist of the 50s era because everyone goes to Elvis or Johnny or Roy Orbison or the Beatles, but I think the hidden gem is Carl. I like to watch videos of these people performing live so I can try to give an accurate accurate representation of what it would have been like to see them live, and Carl Perkins danced just as much as Elvis did. The reason he didn't get censored at all was because he was not as handsome as Elvis. So Elvis moved his hips around and did all the dancing and did all that kind of stuff, and everyone was like “Oh, we have to sensor that because he's too good looking.” Carl was not as good looking, and so people were like “Okay, all right. Cool.”

Watching Carl dance while he plays guitar, I was like “How? How do you just dance and play guitar at the same time?” It's not like Elvis, where he's strumming a couple chords –and maybe he's not actually strumming a couple chords – Carl is playing the guitar. 

Did you have to learn this combination of dancing and playing guitar?

CY: I’ve always had a tendency to move when I play guitar, but wouldn't exactly call it dancing. But it was just kind of feeling the music and moving with it  – I’m not going to stand perfectly still. But Carl and Elvis’ specific motions that they do, I did have to spend a lot of time watching them and how they would have done this. I could do my own dancing, but it's not going to look anything like Elvis or Carl. In doing the research into what moves Elvis did and when, if you look at videos, it actually is really specific. He'll save this move for the end, or he'll do this dance move when he doesn't have to sing because it's so energetic, or he'll do this dance move when he's at the microphone because it was not going to hit the mic. Mic-ography is also a huge thing because they didn’t have the boom mics that come out – it was all straight up mics – so they really used that to their advantage and also learned how to work around it.

How long did it take you to learn and feel comfortable with those dance moves because they are so iconic and specific? 

CY: What day is it today? Just kidding, but I do have to work on it constantly. Because again, if you settle into it, it'll start to get stale, and I never want it to be stale. Rock and roll is anything but stale. To piggyback off of that idea though, another good thing about doing the show nowadays is so many kids right around age 18 don't realize that rock and roll is rebellion. So all these kids want to rebel – kids always want to rebel – they always want to do their own thing and figure it out. They think 50s music is boring and normal, but 50s rock and roll was the original rebellion. It was kids sneaking out to go watch these people rock out, and some of some of these 50s drummers and bassists rock out harder than drummers and bassists today. They're crazy. One thing I'll say about watching these original 50s, 60s, 70s recordings of these famous artists is it's really fun to watch, even if you're not a part of it. Watching it live is being a part of it, so I always try to get as many younger people to come to these 50 shows and musicals to show this is kind of where it all started with rock and roll. 

Is the music in the show only from those few artists you mentioned or is it more encompassing of the genre as a whole? 

CY: It's more encompassing, but it's going to be all Sun Records music. There's going to be a couple big Elvis hits and big Johnny hits that aren't going to be in the show because it was after they had left Sun Records and gone to Columbia or gone to RCA. The big names are the Million Dollar Quartet – Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. And then another name that's not in the Million Dollar Quartet that's huge and we have a big section on is Roy Orbison, who wrote Pretty Woman and a couple of other really great songs. We also have some outlier one-hit wonder songs that were huge hits, like that first rock and roll song that was recorded by the Delta Cats with it with a young Ike Turner on piano before he became huge. But they only had one song that was really famous, so we've got that one song in the show. We also have a couple of one-off songs by artists that we don't portray because they were never really that big. So the biggest artists from Sun Records get the most time on stage but we do have a couple of really good deep cuts. One of my favorite songs in the show is Red Hot and the lyric is “My gal is red hot, your gal ain’t doodly-squat.” It’s a great song and it’s a great lyric. I can’t really argue with that lyric. That's a good lyric. 

Do you have a favorite song in the show?

CY: I really enjoy the Johnny section. I don't have to sing at all in that section. As a musical theater actor, I feel like I'm always singing and portraying so it feels really good sometimes to fade into the background and just be a part of the band and just have fun. So while I love doing Elvis and I love doing Carl, there's also a really special place in my heart for holding down the fort as Johnny Cash gets all the attention. 

You mentioned there are some stories and facts interspersed with the music in the show. Did you know any of this information or was it all new to you? 

CY: For a lot of it, when I was reading it, I was like “I did not know that, that's really cool.” Or realizing that a song is actually a Carl Perkins tune and not a Beatles song – a lot of that came from doing the show and learning all of these great, brilliant facts, which I have thrown in here a little bit. But yes, I learned them as I was doing the show. 

What was the research and fact checking process like to put something like this together? 

CY: One thing that's really cool is John was on the fourth national tour of Million Dollar Quartet, so he spent a lot of time with the show. And because of that he got to meet a lot of relatives of these famous people. He is in very good standing and has history with many family members of the people we honor in the show. An example is that Sun Records itself signed off on it and provided the logo and artwork for the show, so John asked Sun Records and was like “Can we do this?” And they're like “Yeah, and here's the artwork that we use for the company.” 

But anyway, so through doing Million Dollar Quartet, he learned a lot of this and he always loved 50s rock and roll. By doing Million Dollar Quartet, he got to meet a lot of really amazing people and hear a lot of really amazing stories, so all of it was lived and then the culmination of was making the show. 

Do you have a favorite fun fact about the show? 

CY: We encourage people to get up and dance. So if you feel like you want to dance during the show, there will be an area to dance and you should absolutely come and dance. I know that Elvis will be dancing, and maybe you'll get a chance to dance with Elvis. Who knows? 

Can you talk about your connection to this music? 

CY: Every time I come back to this genre of music, it deepens my love for it. I love a wide range of music- I like musical theater, I love progressive metal – like very, very modern music that to the average listener is unlistenable. It's complete opposites – you're listening to a pleasant listen, and then the complete opposite of that comes on with yelling and atonal dissonance that would make a cat run away. I love all of that. But there's something about 50s rock and roll that when I go back to it, I just go back into a “Let me just put in a 50s rock and roll playlist and listen to this for the next month” mood. It catches you in a way that other music doesn't tend to do. With modern music nowadays, you'll hear it and you'll be like “Absolutely. I love that. Let me listen to it.” But something about listening to 50s rock and roll is just….the songs are a little shorter but interesting. They're heavy, but not aggressive. They're energetic, but not crazy. It's, in my opinion, the perfect blend of rebellion and bringing people together.

Did you have that affinity for this music before you started performing in this whole circuit? Or was this a newfound love?

CY: In high school, I was in the ensemble for North Carolina Theatre’s production of Buddy Holly, and that opened my eyes to 50s rock and roll a lot. But it wasn't until I got back into the Million Dollar Quartet world that I was like “Oh, this is still huge. This isn't a piece of history that I open up and read about and then put away.” It's still real. It's around and people love 50s rock and roll a lot more than I expected them to, so it's really refreshing to see something that is, for me, challenging, fun, and something that I can share with other people that will be appreciated.  I don't think I've seen a person come out of the show and not say “That was a lot of fun.” It's just always so much fun.

Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sun Records Live - The Concert will run at Theatre Raleigh through Sunday, February 18, 2024. Tickets can be purchased here.